At Fuse, we define ourselves as an inventory planning tool for growing retailers. We work with many young start-ups who have a diverse set of experiences with the areas we touch like demand forecasting, supply chain and inventory management. Some have experienced planners who come from a background at big companies like Target, J.Crew or Gap. Others are general athletes who’ve had inventory planning and supply chain management thrust upon them. To level the playing field, we decided to answer some basic questions in this post.

What is inventory planning?

Given this disparate set of experiences, we thought we’d take a step back and answer, “What is inventory planning and why is it so critically important?” According to the Business Dictionary, inventory planning is, “The process of determining the optimal quantity and timing of inventory for the purpose of aligning it with sales and production capacity.”

In our last post, we defined supply chain through a series of seven questions. The key questions answered by an inventory planner are questions two and three: "How much inventory will I sell? How much inventory do I need to order?"

We asked Jeffrey Awong, VP of Planning at BarkBox, with prior experience at both Jackthreads and Lord & Taylor for his input:

“Planning functions differ across companies, but at the core, it's really about ensuring that there is a perfect match with the supply of goods and the forecasted demand, with a heavy emphasis on efficiency. As a result, it sits right in the middle of Marketing (understanding demand levers), Finance (P&L and cash flow implications) and Merchandising (to understand the magic of what's being sold).”

Why is inventory planning important?

Cash management is critical for young companies, and planning well can help significantly mitigate inventory risk which can be especially fatal for young companies. It is a function that manages one of if not the biggest investment that a company will make. If a company buys too little of a specific product, then it can lead to stock-outs and lost revenue. If a company buys too much of a product, it can lead to too much cash tied up in working capital that could otherwise have been put to good use elsewhere.

Skilled planners look not only at sales, but also at other metrics like profitability. In a given month, the company may have a certain budget to spend on inventory (typically called an “open to buy”). While you may want to buy $100,000 of product to meet your sales target, you may already have placed POs against that budget. As a small company, you might frequently find yourself in a situation in which you need more product than you can afford. An inexperienced planner might simply replenish the top selling SKUs, but an experienced planner will also look to see which SKUs are the most profitable. This is a critical question to answer, particularly if cash strapped.

How can you improve?

From experience working with our customers, the two most common planning mistakes we’ve seen are:

Focusing on revenue instead of margin. We see far too many companies re-ordering products that are high volume, but low value

Investing in marketing without connecting that investment to inventory. Marketing can drive customers to the site, but that traffic can’t convert into revenue unless there is enough product there to support it. If you’re out of your top selling SKUs, all of the marketing spend in the world might not make a difference

For our young companies, we always recommend bringing on an experienced planning hire early on to save time and money. From day one, you don’t want to be placing your orders based on instinct. Once the planner is on board, Fuse is here to support him or her in crafting the critical pieces of the puzzle, marrying the demand forecast with the initial inventory buy and replenishment recommendation for each season. Our sophisticated algorithms help smooth out outliers and do the grunt work for the planner so that he or she can focus on the more interesting, strategic and analytical work. We’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.